Pay-per-Click Advertising for Commercial Real Estate

To many commercial real estate professionals, the mention of pay-per-click advertising (also known as PPC advertising) makes them cringe. The biggest rift between PPC advertising and commercial real estate agents is a lack of understanding of how PPC advertising works and how it can help to increase sales. By gaining a better understanding of PPC advertising, you can increase your commercial real estate sales and generate more revenue.

How PPC Advertising Works

The easiest PPC advertising program to use is Google Adwords. With Adwords, you pay a small fee to set up each ad and then you submit a bid for how much you would be willing to pay each time someone clicks on your ad. The money you pay per click goes to Google and it goes to the website that hosts your ad.

Google has a huge network of website owners who host Google Adword banners and the ads from the program show up in those banners. Google also offers you the opportunity to have your ads appear along the top or the side of relevant Google searches as well. The more money you bid per click, the more often your ad will show up and the better positioning you will get on the Google results page.

Keywords Are Critical

With Adwords, you select a keyword or keyword phrase that your ad will be attached to. Whenever someone does a search for your keyword on Google or on an affiliate website, your ad could be one of the ads that appears.

For example, if you sell commercial real estate in Dallas, then you may select the keyword phrase "commercial real estate in Dallas, Texas." When someone puts that phrase into Google or the search on a Google affiliate site, then that triggers your ad to appear. Remember that there are probably a lot of ads that are using your keyword phrase, so you will need to bid high for each click if you want to get the maximum possible exposure. The budget you are willing to allocate for clicks under each keyword is dependent on how valuable buyers for that property would be.

Use Google's Advice

When you create your Google Adwords account, you will have access to a library of information you can use to choose good keywords and create effective ads. As a commercial real estate agent, you want the most targeted traffic possible to ensure visitors to your site have a high probability of being future buyers. By utilizing the Google tutorials and information, you will be able to create effective ads that will drive relevant traffic to your content.

Develop Focused PPC Advertising Campaigns

The entire concept behind PPC advertising is to use critical industry keywords to bring potential customers to your website. That means that each of your ads must focus on one keyword or keyword phrase to gain maximum exposure. You should not plan on cramming several keywords into one ad because it is an extremely inefficient way to get results. You end up paying less for each keyword than competitors are for the individual keywords, and show up less than them.

The best approach to take is to map out what kind of advertising you want to do with PPC ads and then start assigning a single keyword or keyword phrase to each advertising plan. Then you can purchase ads for each plan and get the kind of results you want.

PPC Advertising Works

The best reason for using PPC advertising is because it works. According to PPC management firm Wordstream, nearly 65% of Internet users click on PPC advertisements, while only 35% click on links known as organic links.

Organic links are created by developing SEO content and developing a strong linking program with other websites. What this says is that the people who are paying for PPC advertising are seeing nearly twice as many click-thrus as the people who are relying on good SEO tactics to generate traffic. When you utilize PPC advertising and SEO tactics, you can draw a significantly larger audience than if you relied on SEO tactics alone.

Get Started With Your PPC Advertising Campaign Soon

Effective PPC advertising takes time to start working. It can be a full month from the release of your first PPC ad to the time you start seeing results. But as long as you maintain your PPC advertising and keep fine-tuning it, then you will continue to see the positive effects of PPC advertising increase.

The best time to start with PPC advertising is now. The longer you wait, the further ahead of you the other commercial real estate agents in your marketplace will get. By utilizing this powerful form of Internet advertising, you can increase your revenue and broaden your professional network.